Sunday, September 27, 2015

SSD: This changes everything

So someone commented on my last post where I predicted that providing block storage to VM's and object storage for apps was going to be the future of storage, and he pointed out some of the other ramifications of SSD. To whit: Because SSD removes a lot of the I/O restrictions that have held back applications in the past, we are now at the point where CPU in many cases is the restriction. This is especially true since Moore's Law has seemingly gone AWOL. The Westmere Xeon processors in my NAS box on the file cabinet beside my desk aren't much slower than the latest Ivy Bridge Xeon processors. The slight bump in CPU speed is far exceeded by the enormous bump in IOPS that comes with replacing rotational storage with SSD's.

I have seen that personally, myself, in watching a Grails application max out eight CPU cores while not budging the iometer on a database server running off of SSD's. What that implies is that the days of simply throwing CPU at inefficient frameworks like Grails are limited. In the future efficient algorithms and languages are going to come back in fashion to use all this fast storage that is taking over the world.

But that's not what excites me about SSD's. That's just a shuffling of priorities. What excites me about SSD's is that they free us from the tyranny of the elevator. The elevator is the requirement that we sweep the disk drive heads from bottom to top, then from top to bottom, in order to optimize reads. This in turn puts some severe restrictions on how we lay out storage for block storage -- the storage must be stored contiguously so that filesystems layered on top of the block storage can properly schedule I/O out of their buffers to satisfy the elevator. This in turn means we're stuck with the RAID write hole unless we have battery backed cache -- we can't do COW RAID stripe block replacement (that is, write altered blocks of a RAID stripe at some new location on the device then alter a stripe map table to point at those new locations and add the old locations to a free list) because a filesystem on top of the block device would not be able to schedule the elevator properly. The performance of the block storage system would fall over. Thus why traditional iSCSI/Fiber Channel vendors present contiguous LUNs to their clients.

As a result when we've tried to do COW in the past, we did it at the filesystem level so that the filesystem could properly schedule the elevator. Thus ZFS and BTRFS. They manage their own redundancy rather than using RAID at the block layer to handle their redundancy, and ideally want to directly manage the block devices. Unfortunately that really doesn't map well to a block storage back end that is based on LUNs, and furthermore, doesn't map well to virtual machine block devices represented as files on the LUN -- virtual machines all have their own elevators doing what they think are sequential ordered writes, but the COW filesystems are writing at random places, so read performance inside the virtual machines becomes garbage. Thus VMware's VMFS, which is an extent-based clustered filesystem that, again, due to the tyranny of the elevator, keeps the blocks of a virtual machine's virtual disk file located largely contiguously on the underlying block storage so that the individual virtual machines' elevators can schedule properly.

So VMFS talking to clustered block storage is one way of handling things, but then you run into limits on the number of servers that can talk to a single LUN that in turn makes it difficult to manage because you end up with hundreds of LUN's for hundreds of physical compute servers and have to schedule the LUNs so they're only active on the compute servers that have virtual machines on that specific LUN (in order to avoid hitting the limits on number of servers allowed to access a single LUN). What is needed is the ability to allocate block storage on the back end on a per-virtual-machine basis, and have the same capabilities on that back end that VMFS gives us on a single LUN -- the ability to do snapshots, the ability to do sparse LUN's, the ability to copy snapshots as new volumes, and so forth. And have it all managed by the cloud infrastructure software. This was difficult back in the days of rotational storage because we were slaves of the elevator, because we had to make sure that all this storage ended up contiguous. But now we don't -- the writes have to be contiguous, due to the limitations of SSD, but reads don't. And it's the reads that forced the elevator -- scheduling contiguous streams of writes (from multiple virtual machines / multiple files on those virtual machines) has always been easy.

I suspect this difficulty in managing VMFS on top of block storage LUNs for large numbers of ESXi compute servers is why Tintri decided to write their own extent-based filesystem and serve it as a NFS datastore to ESXi boxes, rather than as block storage LUN's. NFS doesn't have the limits on number of computers that can connect. But I'm not convinced that, going forward, this is going to be the way to do things. VSphere is a mature product that has likely reached the limits of its penetration. New startups today are raised in the cloud, primarily on Amazon's cloud, and they want a degree of flexibility to spin virtual machines up and down that make life difficult with a product that has license limits. They want to be able to spin up entire test constellations of servers to run multi-day tests on large data sets, then destroy them with a keystroke. They can do this with Amazon's cloud. They want to be able to do this on their local clouds too. The future is likely to be based on the KVM/QEMU hypervisor and virtualization layer, which can use NFS data stores but they already have the ability to present an iSCSI LUN to a virtual machine as a block device. Add in some local SSD caching at the local hypervisor level to speed up writes (as I explained last month), and you have both the flexibility of the cloud and the speed of SSD. You have the future -- a future that few storage vendors today seem to see, but one that the block storage vendors in particular are well equipped to capture if they're willing and able to pivot.

Finally, there is a question as to whether storage and compute should be separate things altogether. Why not have compute in the same box as your storage? There's two problems with that though: 1) you want to upgrade compute capability to faster processors on a regular basis without disrupting your data storage, and b) density of compute servers is much higher than density of data servers, i.e., you can put four compute blades into the same 2U space as a 24-bay data server. And as pointed out above, compute power is now going to be the limiting factor for many applications, not IOPs. Finally, you want the operational capability to add more compute servers as needed. When our team used up the full capacity of our compute servers, I just added another compute server -- I had plenty of storage. Because the demand for compute and memory just keeps going up as our team has more combinations of customer hardware and software to test, it's likely I'm going to continue to have to scale compute servers far more often than I have to scale storage servers.

So this has gone on much too long but the last thing to cover is this: Will storage boxes go the way of the dodo bird, replaced by software-defined solutions like Ceph on top of large numbers of standard Linux storage servers serving individual disks as JBOD's? It's possible, I suppose -- but it seems unlikely due to the latency of having to locate disk blocks scattered across a network. I do believe that commodity hardware is going to win everything except the high end big iron database business in the end because the performance of commodity hardware has risen to the point where it's pointless to design your own hardware rather than purchase it off the shelf from a vendor like Supermicro. But there is still going to be a need for a storage stack tied to that hardware in the end because pure software defined solutions are unable to do rudimentary things like, e.g., use SES to blink the LED of a disk bay whose SSD has failed. In the end providing an iSCSI LUN directly to a virtual machine requires both a software support side that is clearly software defined, and a hardware support side where the hardware is managed by the solution. This in turn implies that we'll continue to have storage vendors shipping storage boxes in the future -- albeit storage boxes that will incorporate increasingly large amounts of software that runs on infrastructure servers to define important functions like, e.g., spinning up a virtual machine that has a volume attached of a given size and IOPs guarantee.

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About Me

I am a senior lead engineer and architect who has taken multiple products from concept to market and beyond. I am also one of the original Linux penguins -- my first Linux product hit the market in June 1996 and its latest incarnation is still running to this day.